Serve It Forth: A Food History Festival
18 October 2025 – Online
We’re bringing together writers, historians, podcasters, and curious minds for a day of delicious discovery. Talks, conversations… all from the comfort of your own kitchen.
In this bonus episode, Allie (one dark half of Fear Feasts!) is joined by her friends and fellow food historians Thomas Ntinas, Sam Bilton, and Neil Buttery. Together they share how each of them first got drawn into food history, what continues to inspire them, and some of the surprises they've encountered along the way.
How do people find their way into food history? What myths surround the field? And do they sometimes meet with culinary catastrophes of our own?!
Allie's input will of course be tinged with spookiness and dread in the company of death historian and funerary expert Dr Dan O’Brien!
Their session, entitled: The River Remembers: A Journey Through London’s Lost Larder will take audiences on a dark voyage through food, death, and the forgotten histories of the Thames. From butchered whales washed ashore to bottles dredged from disaster sites, and from the feasting tables of the living to the memento mori traditions that remind us that bodies too become food. Allie and Dan will explore how the river bears witness to centuries of consumption and decay. Following the shifting shoreline, they'll trace fragments of lost lives and meals that once sustained the capital- an unsettling story of what (and who) London has eaten.
Important Links